Our second year student Logan Bingham  from USA, spend his Summer doing in too different institutions. In his words:

"For the first part of the summer, I had the opportunity to work on a project for the Forest Stewardship Council in Lisbon (thanks to an introduction by our Forest Governance professor, Prof. Ochôa). First, I conducted a review of publicly available audit documents for all FSC certified forests in Portugal. Next, I built some simple SQL and Excel databases giving a global view of certification types, extents, and the frequency of non-conformities, and wrote a report visualizing the data and summarizing my findings. This kind of analysis can provide a reference point for tracking how new certification categories are developing (e.g. group certifications for small and low-intensity managed forests), and potentially highlight patterns in non-conformities so that common pitfalls can be proactively avoided.

Currently, I'm Solsona, Spain, doing an internship with Dr. Jordi Garcia-Gonzalo at the Forest Science and Technology Center of Catalonia (CTFC). I was able to participate in this internship thanks to recommendations by the MEDfOR Coordinator and Secretariat, Prof. Borges and Dr. Catarina Tavares. Briefly, Jordi's research team recently finished building a forest growth and yield simulator, which can be applied to evaluate different management alternatives in Catalonia. Using the simulator and Pareto frontiers generated by a linear programming model, I'm exploring how the landscape is affected when we emphasize certain ecosystem services over others, and looking at some of the trade-offs that necessarily exist between those service bundles.

Both of these experiences have been valuable and rewarding opportunities to take concepts directly from class and apply them in practice. My professors at ISA not only went out of their way to connect me to these opportunities, but throughout the year also gave me a solid theoretical and practical grounding that has allowed me engage with this work in the first place. "